below the feeder on the flag stone with the discarded seedscheerful beak yellow/black

you come in close

I think ofyour melodious song the pleasure seeing you hearing you feeding you with the other 88%and I can’t see the difference.

*It is estimated that 12% of blackbirdsin the UK winter have flown in from Scandinavia.Some observers say that their beaks areblack rather than yellow.

Moira Garland

Papers

I spent the day adrift, waist-deep in paper,scrabbling for one note I’d folded away,a list of strangers’ names. The air was hot,like coarse wool scratching at my face, and panic,urgent, bubbled up through the bare floor.

With open eyes, I dreamt all night of waves,my muscles clamped tight as parched throatsthat can neither beg nor scream, while beneath the moon,expendable cargo snored, imagining light,their rigid forms breathing ragged, dreamingwords to life, like sinews of a new monster,frighteningly beautiful, with paper skin shining.Tomorrow lurched in the cough of the failing engine,was slapped down hard with mismatched oars.

* * *

I unfold a simple map with just a crossand one word in a language I don’t recognise.Fearful of my neighbour’s eyes, I see insteadnothing, bounded by walls and wire, endlessqueues to join other endless queues, to pronouncethe unknown Home, to see myself capturedon a flickering monitor screen, and to call myself Free.

Oz Hardwick

LOINER

The deckhands put me off at Hull.It was all I could do to stand up with the new countrylisting under my feet worse than the ship and the stinkof the docks and the sick in the back of my throat.They took one look and said Leeds – threw the wordinto my arms like a half-full sack – they knew me for a Jewand Jews are tailors and Leeds is cloth. I carted that wordthrough flat fields, held onto it and didn’t look backtill the city broke around my ears like lightat the end of a tunnel, smoke and dosshouses and hard luck,no English like I’d ever heard, my few words bad penniesthat came back as we slept ten to a room in the Leylandsand I lay awake as the trams bashed pastand I counted the hours and I changed my name.

§

Leeds was cloth alright – the river blinkered and dragging machines.All English cloth smells of water – water’s in the weftand the wool, every Englishman up to his stiff white collarsin water and in Leeds it’s the Aire and that’s how they talk.

§

Half my life I’ve been waist-deep in offcuts,the other I couldn’t hear myself shout for the machines,miles of stitching running through our fingers.Briggate was offcuts of arms and legs, people sprawledon the cutting room floor covering themselves in rags –everything pushed out of shape in the seams of the streetsand what I dreamed of wasn’t success – warm and fatin the palm of my hand – it was my accent fadinglike band music on a Sunday. I wanted to put the rag trade in a tinso it rattled at the bottom of a drawer and take it out sometimesfor the grandkids – the machine smell still clinging to bits of hemand measurements and I tell them what it was I didand they look at me from out of the England they take for grantedand they tell me in their soapy Yorkshire voicesthat they don’t believe a word of it.

Ian Harker

Refugee Girl

Silent girl, a thousand miles away from home,Like a frozen icicle slowly melting,Before grey men, in grey suits, in a grey room,Dissolving in the heat of harsh questioning.

Where are your mother, father, brother,Why come here? How old are you? Where are you from?‘How to speak of the beloved mother?’Silent girl, a thousand miles away from home.

‘The harsh screeching of the wind through the sandsSand in our hair, in our mouths and our eyes,Mother falling, her neck cracks as she lands,Little brother, the wind sweeps away our cries’.

The brother, they are demanding, what of him?‘How to explain how he slipped through my hands,’Pale eyes, straight mouths, and faces grim,‘The harsh screeching of the winds through the sands.’

Speak silent girl, for those forever silent.Like the iceberg calving, splits and cracks and parts, The groaning sounds of calving words has rentThe peace in grey rooms, and splintered frozen hearts.